


“Bastard, orphan, son of [redacted]”: The Hamilton-Washington Connection Through a Maternal Lens

by icarusandtheson



Series: The Hamilton Papers [2]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Essays, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-13 01:28:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15353202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarusandtheson/pseuds/icarusandtheson
Summary: An analysis of Hamilton and Washington’s relationship as fictionally portrayed in “Hamilton: An American Musical” considering Hamilton’s relationship with Rachel Faucette, themes of loss, abandonment, and remembrance.





	“Bastard, orphan, son of [redacted]”: The Hamilton-Washington Connection Through a Maternal Lens

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to Hobbes, as always, for support and willingness to endure countless Rachel-related chat threads. Thanks to my followers on Tumblr, who put up with my constant meta with astoundingly good humor and extensive kindness, and supported this work when it was only an 800 word scrap of meta.

Rachel Faucette is mentioned in precisely four songs of  _ Hamilton: An American Musical.  _ She is never named, references to her are brief at best and insulting at worst, and yet her life and death haunt the narrative. Anyone who has followed me in this fandom, even briefly, knows I care about her, and her relationship to Alexander, very deeply. I’ve yet to receive a question about  _ why  _ I care about this dynamic so much, which I think speaks to some deeper understanding we all share -- we know Rachel is important, we know her relationship with her son is important, and all that I intend to do here is dig a little more deeply into that knowledge. 

If you know about my feelings on Rachel, then you also know my feelings on Alexander and Washington’s relationship. Even the casual fan would be hard-pressed to explore this dynamic and not come across the plethora of theorizing that has been done about the parallels between this dynamic and Alexander’s relationship (or lack thereof) with absentee father James Hamilton. Now, Rachel is only mentioned four times in the musical, but James is only mentioned  _ twice.  _ As far as I have encountered, there is precious little material exploring her role in a similar context, so for the next little while I’m going to give Rachel her due, as well as delve into some of the complexities that make Alexander and Washington’s dynamic so frustrating and so rewarding. 

This is, of course, all conjecture -- there is no other description I can use, with so few textual references to either parent. Moreover, Washington and Hamilton’s canon relationship is fraught, to say the least, and open to countless interpretations. I draw connections to Hamilton’s behavior that I believe make sense, from a narrative perspective, to have stemmed from the loss of his mother. As always, I’m coming at Hamilton as a fictional text, not a piece of history, and all analysis is based within this framing, for my own entertainment, and the reader’s.  

 

**His father split, full of it -- On James, Rachel, Washington, and parallels therein**

 

According to Genius.com, the Off-Broadway version of  _ Alexander Hamilton  _ says “full of shit” instead. I mention it here to frame the argument that follows. 

People tend to draw connections between Washington and the absentee James Hamilton, for fairly obvious reasons. Absent father, would-be father figure. In many ways, this is what gives Alexander and Washington’s dynamic, in whatever iteration, so much struggle and difficulty and complexity. There are many different emotions at play on various levels, both past and present. Whether Washington’s relationship with Alexander parallels or contrasts James’ is not often dissected in much detail -- the extent of the argument usually rests on  _ Meet Me Inside,  _ and Alexander’s discomfort and anger with being called “son”. Since Washington is a man and a father figure, the explanation for this discomfort is usually boxed away as “daddy issues” and not revisited. 

However, unlike James, Washington wants Alexander. In  _ Right Hand Man  _ he requests him specifically to work for him, and trusts him almost immediately -- enough to share his private concerns to the extent that even Alexander asks, “Why are you telling me this?” When they fight in  _ Meet Me Inside,  _ Washington calls him back, and does so again in  _ Non-Stop. _ I do not doubt that James’ abandonment lingers behind the scenes and influences some of the strain between these two characters, but I do doubt that solely considering James’ influence yields a complete picture. 

If James is “full of it”, Washington is utterly grounded -- in both his perception of himself and of his reality. We see this often throughout the musical, but we see it especially clearly in  _ Right Hand Man:  _ regarding the reality of the war, he’s fully aware his troops are “outgunned” and “outmanned”. Regarding his own reputation --“ men are all lining up to put me on a pedestal, writing letters to relatives embellishing my elegance and eloquence”. He is fully aware of his own limitations, and the way others seek to obscure those limitations in service of a greater narrative. Despite this, or maybe because of it, the narrative perceives him as honorable. Alexander, regardless of his tension with the man, perceives him as honorable. LMM mentions in the  _ Right Hand Man  _ Genius.com annotations that he wrote Washington as “an unimpeachable moral authority”, and it shows. He is as far from the man who abandoned Alexander and his mother as could possibly be. 

This brings us to Rachel: a woman, referenced only briefly, and often referred to outside of Alex (and Eliza’s) recounting as “a whore” (for the record, my tally of Rachel’s mention in the play do not count the many, many times this is mentioned -- I count the time Alexander’s “mother” is referenced). At first glance, she has less in common with Washington than James does. Something worth noting: Genius.com confirms that she was not a literal prostitute -- it’s an epithet, probably alluding to the fact that she wasn’t married to James, but to someone else. She was also accused of cheating on that husband who was, by all accounts, horrid to her. On that note, let’s talk a bit more about “moral authority” and who has it. 

Lee insults Washington, particularly attacking his fitness to lead. We know Lee is in the moral wrong for several reasons: Washington has already been set up as the “only … man” who can lead the revolution, and Lee’s attack is framed as a peevish response to consequences of his own cowardice. The chorus gasps, and Washington continues to exert his moral authority by ordering Alexander to not do anything, assuring him that “history will prove [Lee] wrong”. Washington even takes the high road after the ill-advised duel -- he thanks Lee for his service. Therefore, Washington retains moral authority in the narrative, and Lee has none. But even more important is how  _ Alexander  _ views the insult -- he disobeys Washington (through a loophole, but the fact remains) in order to see Lee pay for the insult. If the musical is told more or less through Alexander’s eyes, following significant events of his life, and if Washington is the moral authority of the musical, we can begin to lay the foundation for a more complex connection. 

Rachel’s parallel to this runs throughout the entire musical via the “whore” designation, most often used by Burr in the opening lines of songs. Burr’s moral authority within the play is… difficult, to say the least. He kills the protagonist, but only because he fears he himself will be killed, thus orphaning his daughter. There are doubtlessly moments in which we as an audience sympathize with him, even side with him. I talked in my previous essay about the difficulties of considering “Burr the Narrator” versus “Burr the Character”, but within this context, I believe it’s safe to assume we are dealing with “Burr the Narrator” -- calling Alexander the “son of a whore” seems to be less Burr’s own judgement than it is a reflection of the views of their society and how it remembered him. Alexander, the “bastard orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman” -- the entire musical is taking up the task of dismantling this definition and showing who he really was, how he was so much more than these epithets. Therefore, Burr’s moral authority is less of an issue, here (though it’s interesting to note that in  _ Ten Duel Commandments,  _ Burr is Lee’s second). The grievance should be directed more at general tendencies of labelling women as “Madonna or whore” extremes -- this is reinforced by Alexander’s fondness towards his mother’s memory, and the fact that she was, by all accounts, a good and loving woman despite what is said about her by others. In this way, Rachel retains some measure of moral authority after her death -- significantly more so than James, who is remembered fondly by no one, not even his son. We never get Alexander’s response to hearing Rachel insulted directly -- however, I would expect a fairly explosive reaction. 

I would argue that Rachel and Washington occupy the same type of place in Alexander’s life -- perhaps what Washington would call “a pedestal”. It’s worth bringing up  _ The World Was Wide Enough  _ to make this point -- there’s clearly a connection between the people Alexander remembers (or sees, as the case may be). Laurens and Philip, connected by their untimely deaths, Philip and Rachel by virtue of being Alexander’s family and him taking some comfort at the thought of Philip being cared for as he himself once was, and -- Rachel and Washington. Moments from death, as honest as we have ever seen him be, Alexander links them through order. 

Further explanations for this order will unfold as we continue. 

 

**I grew up buckwild -- On parental legacy**

 

When we discuss Alexander’s reluctance to let Washington close --  _ Meet Me Inside  _ being the most obvious example of this tension -- I would argue that there is a substantial amount of his trauma over Rachel’s death in that, not just James’ abandonment. By all accounts in the text (again, “full of [sh]it”) James care little for his son, so the pain Alexander is protecting himself against by refusing Washington’s attempts at affection and comfort, I would argue, stems from the loss of the one person Alex ever drew affection and comfort from. James was by all accounts distant, certainly didn’t try to reach out and establish a connection like Washington does. Like Washington  _ repeatedly does,  _ from their first meeting to their last. 

_ One Last Time,  _ and the fact that Washington  _ does _ eventually split, will be addressed later on.

If it was just about “daddy issues”, why do any overtures of affection incite so much anxiety and reluctance from Alexander? Wouldn’t he want that? Maybe, maybe not. It is difficult to determine what paternal abandonment did to him. However, by all accounts he was very close to his mother. They were together when she died, both having become ill around the same time. She was holding him, and he was twelve already -- still a child, but not a young child. There’s a closeness denoted there, a standard of love and care, and it is reflected by Alex’s clear grief discussing her in  _ Hurricane _ and his assertion in  _ Helpless _ that he’ll “never forget [her] face, that was real” (’that’, we can safely assume, indicating their love for each other), that can safely be drawn to their entire relationship. I posit that Alex runs from George’s affection because he’s already had it. He had it, he treasured it, and it was torn from him before its time. If he barely survived it the first experience of that kind of loss, it’s difficult to imagine why would he willingly put himself back there a second time -- in a war zone at that, where risk is even higher than in his previous experiences. 

In my previous  _ Hamilton  _ essay, I talked at length about Alexander and his struggle with his work under Washington, and how that ties into Alexander’s many issues with toxic masculinity. For this paper, I want to suggest a derivative of that: Alexander equates glory, even if death, with manhood, and I would further argue, adulthood. The opening of  _ Right Hand Man  _ supports this: “As a kid in the Caribbean, I wished for a war, I knew that I was poor, I knew it was the only way to rise up”. He only starts to relent when Washington notes that a “head full of fantasies of dying like a martyr” is a characteristic of someone who is “younger”. Even still, in  _ The Story of Tonight (Reprise),  _ he tells Burr he wishes he had Burr’s command, “instead of manning George’s journal”. This indicates to me a desire for Alexander to distance himself from childish things -- one of which involves being kept back from action, kept safe, under the watchful eye of a benevolent authority figure. Part of that, I argue, stems from the fact that he’s already been that child, has already been protected (again, we return to Rachel holding him, protecting him in his illness) and knows intimately how unwise it is to put faith in that. He’s wary of repeating past mistakes -- that is, wary of making himself vulnerable to elements out of his control. He’s not afraid of being abandoned (or not  _ only  _ that), which would be the case if the James theory held true -- he’s afraid of being held too close. 

If there’s a moment I would say we see James’ legacy, it comes right after Washington tells Alexander to go home in  _ Meet Me Inside _ . The “but sir”’ is performed in the OCR in such a small, lost voice; I think here, in this moment where Washington seems to have removed all affection (even though, ironically enough, he hasn’t, he’s trying to save Alexander and return him to his family) that we maybe see an echo of the boy who watched his father walk away. 

But the extra knife in the gut to that is that he knows, at some point, the affection  _ was _ there. It’s reflective of both his parental losses, and it is triggered by him acting on his affection for Washington and defending his honor. Washington’s assertion that he is “not a maiden in need of defending, [he is] grown” both hits the mark and misses the point. Alexander wants to protect Washington, not because he believes him childish or incompetent, but because he is keenly aware that people do not cease being vulnerable as adults. It was a lesson he learned well as a child.   

George’s “Son, I need you alive” and Alexander’s’s strong reaction to it in  _ Meet Me Inside _ could be explained by this theory too. I find it hard to believe that Rachel didn’t express that same sentiment before she died, in some way or other. Washington is deeply afraid of losing Alexander, and by taking control of the situation and denying Alexander the command, he places Alexander in a renewed state of vulnerability. It is a painfully fraught moment on every level -- both men want to protect, both are so close to understanding and yet so far from it. 

Interestingly, we do see a resolution --  _ History Has Its Eyes On You  _ shows Washington elaborating his tragic past and offering the closest we (and Alexander) ever have to an explanation of why he is so concerned about sending Alexander to fight. Washington is worried about Alexander dying, about failing him as Washington failed the soldiers under his first command. “Or you could die!” has so much more emotional power after this confession. Washington relents, they win the day -- but not before Washington offers one last bit of advice. “You have no control: who lives, who dies, who tells your story” -- Alexander never seems to fully grasp this theme, though it will follow him for the rest of his days. Nevertheless, it echoes Washington’s earlier assertions in  _ Right Hand Man  _ about youth and the pointlessness of martyrdom. It also reads to me as preemptive forgiveness -- if soldiers die under Alexander’s command, Washington wants to spare him the guilt of it. But at this point in the narrative, before the battles, before any of the significant deaths, who has died in a significant way in Alexander’s life? Only Rachel. In  _ Hurricane _ , Alexander notes, “we were sick and she was holding me, I couldn’t seem to die.” There is so much survivor’s guilt in that song, and the OCR performance of it sounds, to me, like the grief is still fresh. Decades later, and the wound has not yet closed. 

I doubt Washington knows about Alexander’s past -- our protagonist is much too eager for advancement to admit to his roots. But we as the audience know. Intended or not, Washington’s line, caution and forgiveness all at once, offers if not a solution, then comfort, for the trauma Alex has carried and will carry until he sees both Rachel and Washington at the ends of things. 

 

**How to say goodbye -- on One Last Time**

Fans of the Washington/Hamilton dynamic will, most likely, be a fan of  _ One Last Time.  _ This may seem counterintuitive; it is, after all, their final song together, where Washington exits the narrative and Alexander’s life permanently. In reality, the fondness for this song comes from the fondness shared between the characters. The most representative of this, in my opinion, is Washington’s gently exasperated, “Shh, talk less,” expressed when Alexander still believes the issue at hand involves Jefferson. It’s a fascinating twist of the words Burr used at the musical’s beginning to undercut Alexander’s loudmouth tendencies. We know this because Washington urges Hamilton to “pick up a pen, start writing” later in the song. Washington sees the value in Hamilton’s words, so him saying “talk less” is more endearment than insult. This line, and the closeness it gestures at, serves my purposes here because it indicates a strong bond between the two characters that Alexander simply did not have with James. He has accepted, up to a point, Washington’s affection, and seems happy enough with it until Washington informs him that he’s leaving. This is in and of itself significant -- just as I posit that Alexander’s reluctance to become close to Washington stems from Rachel’s loss, so too does his relative acquiescence indicate to me the beginnings of healing, or at least coming to terms with the loss of a much-beloved parental/authority figure. 

And then Washington leaves.  

There is an interesting creative choice made towards the end of the song. Alexander, finally (if reluctantly) accepting Washington’s resignation, echoes Washington’s intent: to “teach [America] how to say goodbye”. Washington finishes the thought, “You and I,” and then, “Going home.” At a glance, these are two separate thoughts that happen to be placed back to back, and as a result, when sung, sound like one thought. They don’t make narrative sense otherwise: Alexander and Washington are never in the same place again while alive. The lyrics hint at a unity, a home, that doesn’t exist. I see a connection, here, between this strange line and Alexander’s assertion in  _ Helpless  _ that he’s “been without a family since [he] was a child”. 

That’s the crux of it. Alexander isn’t going home. He is, in a very real way, losing the one home he could reliably depend on since the war: Washington. Here is perhaps the greatest argument that James is the ghost haunting Alex, not Rachel. Washington  _ leaves.  _ However, we once again look to the end of Alexander’s life -- he sees his mother, and he sees his general. James’ abandonment was never forgiven, but Alexander does not equate Washington leaving office with that trauma. There is far more of Rachel’s legacy here, of love and remembrance and loss, than James’. To explain this, we have to look at the purpose  _ One Last Time  _ serves within the narrative: it’s Washington’s  _ last  _ song, in every meaning of the word. He dies, sometime after the song, and that twists his exit into an echo of Rachel’s. It is, in many ways, the goodbye Alex never got as a child, from either parent. Of course he sees Washington at the end of it all. Of course he sees him immediately after he sees Rachel. All of these threads have always been tied together. 

 

**What is a legacy? -- On the point of it all**

 

More talk about Rachel needs to happen, or at least the idea of the maternal figure in Alex’s life, in the way that James is obliquely referenced as a void in discussion of Alexander’s “daddy issues”. Because Rachel is there. Rachel is a literal ghost in the musical, and the characters that take on her mantle are Eliza and George, from the beginning. They are the characters that sing about Alex’s childhood, they plus Angelica are the ones warning him in Hurricane. Eliza tries but she is ultimately not enough -- through no fault of her own -- to stop Alex from destroying his (their) life, or from dying. This is rather baldly demonstrated at the end of Act One -- Eliza asks, heartbroken, “Isn’t this enough to be satisfied?” as Alexander rips his arm from hers and Angelica’s grasps to climb the scaffolding to Washington. Here, “this” is her, and Philip, and the idea of family and domesticity that Alexander referenced in _Helpless._ It isn’t enough -- explanations for that could take up a separate paper, but for my purposes, it’s enough to say that much. But, as a brief aside: it’s telling that his contact with his son goes from the idealistic newfound joy of _Dear Theodosia_ to the distance in _Take a Break,_ his mind still on work on his son’s birthday: “Hey, our kid is pretty great,” Alexander says, with something that smacks of surprise. There is another, significantly less optimistic, paper in that -- Washington isn’t the one carrying on James’ legacy in any sense. There’s an argument to be made that Alexander is. 

Therefore, if the end goal of this entire intellectual exercise is to seek a hypothetical solution of some sort, we have to briefly return to  _ One Last Time  _ and Alexander’s relative comfort with Washington’s emotional proximity. There’s a glimmer of hope, both there and in the well-established fact that Alexander will uproot his entire life to come when Washington calls. Despite his best efforts, Alex is allowing an emotional closeness that I would argue he has not seen or experienced since childhood. 

We see this foreshadowed in  _ Meet Me Inside.  _ Hamilton wants to die, has wanted to die since Rachel did. In Hurricane, we hear him say, grief-stricken after all these years, that he “couldn’t seem to die”, a word choice that definitely indicates a desire, or at least an exhaustion that acted similarly, to die. In MMI, he says he is “more than willing to die” for the revolution, and, it could be drawn from the context of the argument, for Washington. And to die for Washington? To see him victorious, or at the least safe? Isn’t that a way to somehow staunch that lifelong ache, that sense of guilt and failure and regret from his childhood? There’s something to be said for the warmth in Alexander’s voice during  _ Yorktown:  _ “I see George Washington smile.” In the midst of this glory, this victory he’s been craving from the beginning of the musical, Alexander takes time to make note of this. To me, it reads a bit like shorthand for a greater theme we’ve been dealing with. They’re both alive, and Alexander is satisfied without dying a martyr’s death, because he helped lead them to victory -- and, I’d argue, because  _ Washington made it.  _ He’s alive, he’s victorious, and that’s enough -- enough to make Alexander go back to being his “secretary” even after the war is over. He’s reframing his definitions of success based on what Washington taught him, and we see genuine growth here. There is also an unmistakable echo between “I see George Washington smile” and “I’ll never forget my mother’s face” from  _ Helpless.  _ That was real. That had meaning. Alexander so rarely comments on  _ faces,  _ on physical appearance (unlike the Schuylers in  _ Helpless/Satisfied,  _ as has been mentioned extensively _ )  _ that this connection seems fairly significant. 

If it’s possible for Rachel to have a successor in caring for Alexander, I would make an argument that it’s Washington -- or at least that from all the characters we see in the musical, he’s the only one with the potential to take on that role successfully and have Alexander listen. We know this because he has  _ done it,  _ successfully, throughout the musical. Much has been said about how Alexander’s life goes to hell after Washington leaves, and that’s the point. Alexander has been without a family for years, and that means he has been without guidance. Washington fills that role, without a doubt. 

If Washington were played by a woman, I doubt this would be overlooked -- indeed, I wonder if this essay would be necessary at all. To miss these connections on the basis of gender, I think, does a disservice to the many possibilities of analysis presented in this musical. 

Alexander made a lot of promises in  _ Helpless  _ that he fails to live up to as his story unfolds.  _ The World Was Wide Enough  _ proves that he keeps at least one. He never forgot Rachel’s face, “that was real.”

He never forgot Washington, either. That was real, too. The fact that Washington is the only hallucination/ghost who is actively “watching” Alexander suggests some reciprocation on this theme, or at least a desire for it on Alexander’s part.

“Daddy issues” isn’t even the half of it. 

**Author's Note:**

> *Thanks for reading! Leave a kudos and comment if you liked it!  
> *Find me on Tumblr at [icarusandtheson](https://icarusandtheson.tumblr.com/)


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